The 20th Marfield Prize Judges

Nate Brown

Nate Brown is a writer, editor, and senior lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. His stories, essays, features, and interviews have appeared in One Story, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, Electric Literature, Publisher’s Weekly, LitHub, and other publications. He is editor-at-large of the award-winning literary journal American Short Fiction in Austin, TX and he has received fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Vermont Studio Center, the Ucross Foundation, and multiple work-study scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Tafisha A. Edwards

Tafisha A. Edwards is author of two chapbooks: In the Belly of the Mirror (Telemagenta Press, 2021) and The Bloodlet (Phantom Books, 2016), winner of the Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her collection Asunder was a finalist for the 2022 The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2021 Rubys Artist Grant from the Robert Deutsch Foundation and a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Regional Award. Her work has appeared in Kweli Journal, The Baltimore Fishbowl, The Georgia Review, Apogee Journal, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Winter Tangerine and other print and online publications.

Keith D. Leonard

An Associate Professor of Literature at American University since 1999, Keith D. Leonard is the author ofFettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (2006) and several essays on African American poetry. He has also given lectures on the public life of African American poets, the African American literary avant-garde, and on Afrofuturism.  He has edited special issues of the journals Callaloo,MELUS, and Obsidian and is currently editing theCambridge History of African American Poetry